Pause in Motion

Kaliferic Confessions #1

Pause.

My heart beats with a lull I can’t place.

In between each pulsing exertion I faintly glean a taste of sweet release.

A pool of cooling water, soothing to my frustrated senses.

So expansive, so infinite, yet so fleeting. A promise broken with each defying push of effort made to sustain my being.

Is this the essence of paradox? The force that moves me towards life is what keeps me from knowing true peace. Forever I am in motion, for that is what it means to be alive. Forever I am propelled outwards and forwards and sideways, never able to rest in eternity. Rest in the quiet cocoon of silence and oceanic solitude.

So great is my yearning for this silent space that I forgo the beauty that wells up around me. I forget that the earth moves in the same quiet grace that fills the spaces between my beating heart. I forget that the sun silently stretches its loving embrace towards this planet, dazzling it with its glittering affection.

Trees breathe and stretch their ancient skin so slowly it's easy to forget that they too are alive. The whole vast expanse of nature is teeming, seething with dizzying motion. Yet it is so silent. The bliss of nature flowing in its primordial state is so peaceful.

This peace is so continuously robbed from me.

My heart, in its frantic pleas towards safety, would be damned to learn to listen, to slow down, to intertwine itself within the great fabric of the world in and around me. So deafening is the thundering in my chest, the blood in my ears, the liquid lightning in my veins that I too consistently lose myself to so primordial fear, some void where life seems not to perish, but rather simply not exist at all.

This is the greatest fear of course, this fear of not existing, not death as so many think. Death is a relief. Death is a promise. Behind the walls of death lie something better, something—anything—that is distinctly not this. As bad as this life can get, death can always promise transcendental grass so green it nearly melts your eyes.

No, death is not the greatest fear.

Rather, it is the conscious experience of dying and nothing happening. Purgatory. Of being trapped in a frozen void of eternally fragmented awareness. To exist and truly not be seen or acknowledged. Adrift over a vast abyss full of the terrifying unknown, left completely alone. Completely alone.

It’s ironic when you think about it. This fear of nonexistence. Just being conscious of this fact is proof that it is false. As long as I have certainty in any belief, I have existence. As long as I’m aware of what is occurring to me, I am secure in my experience. I am real.

To be real. Really real. To be so secure in your realness that you could dangle precariously over the abyss of nonbeing and still face it unafraid. That is the pure essence of the conscious seeker. The attuned mystic who seeks union with something far greater than itself. That seeks the real, true, ineffable God.

This pure, unadulterated awareness. This eternal pause between heartbeats. This core subjective perspective. This is me, this is God, this is all that ever was and will be. It holds every perspective, for every living being holds at its center this exact same awareness. We are all eternally united in the One. One source, one presence, one awareness.

This is the pause between heartbeats, the stretching of the bark of trees, the twinkling of stars as they wink and wave at each other across eons. It is always there, always will be there, part and parcel of eternity and the finite.

This heart will beat, then it will stop beating. Someday my lungs will push their last bout of air from my body and I will cease to be in motion.

But this eternal center? This sacred pause in between the pulsations of my vital organs, this will remain eternal. This will pass on to some other state. This will remain as the One and return to the many. The eternal experience of God and Garden.

The noise of life does not hold me from obtaining this experience. It is one with experience, for I can never truly lose this silent space. While it is transcendental in form, it is also immanent in all of reality.

This sacred pause.